A move is underway to transform California public universities from institutions dedicated to educating and empowering the nation’s next generation of leaders into abortion vendors. The California state assembly is now considering SB 320, a measure that would mandate that all California state-funded universities administer RU-486, a drug designed to induce abortion, on their campuses. The idea is to have schools partner with mega-abortion providers so that students at risk from a lonely and potentially dangerous abortion can access them from their dorm rooms.
Parents and students should be very worried about this aggressive attempt to reconfigure student health centers from places of healing to abortion franchises in business with detached abortion mega-providers who reap the reward without the risk. And the risks can be grave.
The FDA reports that such drug-induced abortions have led to cases of extreme bleeding, infection and incomplete abortions requiring a surgery, and even to the death of mothers. The drugs are especially dangerous to women who are later in pregnancy or are experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, both conditions which must be determined by an ultrasound (using equipment not usually found in a college health center.) And that is before we add in the emotional experience of waiting alone in a bathroom to see the pre-born infant pass into a toilet.
Writing about her chemical abortion, former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson talked about her horrific encounter with an abortion that lasted for 8 weeks and began minutes after taking the drug.
“Ten minutes later, I started to feel pain in my abdomen unlike anything I had ever experienced,” she wrote. “Then the blood came. It was gushing out of me. I couldn’t wear a pad … nothing was able to absorb the amount of blood I was losing. The only thing I could do was sit on the toilet. I sat there for hours … bleeding, throwing up into the bathroom trashcan, crying and sweating. I used to watch shows about childbirth. I would see these women in labor and they would be covered in sweat. I would always think, ‘Gosh, do they keep it hot in the delivery room, or what?’ But at that moment, sitting on the toilet, I knew it wasn’t from heat … it was from pain.”
Writing about his pain as a father, Monty Patterson recalls the day his 18-year-old daughter Holly died in a San Francisco area hospital from Septic Shock due to endomyometritis (uterus-related blood infection) caused by a drug-induced abortion. He learned about RU-486 at his daughter’s bedside, when “the doctor came in and briskly explained, ‘We are doing everything we can for her, but she might not make it. These things sometimes happen as a result of the pill.’
“I was completely baffled,” he wrote. “‘What, the birth control pill?’ I asked. ‘No, the abortion pill,’ the doctor replied.”
The family later learned that Holly had called the Planned Parenthood clinic hotline to complain about severe cramping, and was told to take a prescribed Tylenol-Codeine painkiller.
“After Holly’s funeral, I learned that she had relied on information from the internet in addition to the advice she had received from her abortion provider (Planned Parenthood) about the risks of medical abortion,” her father wrote.
And therein lies the problem. In handing out potentially deadly drugs to students who don’t have a frame of reference for how much pain is too much and how much blood loss is dangerous, California contemplates becoming the bellwether state in experimenting with young lives. This is not merely a California initiative. Students travel from all over the world to be educated in the state’s finest institutions, and the bill’s sponsor describes this as “a model across the country, for every state.”
Taxpayers, parents and students might ask, who benefits from such a risk?
A look at the bill’s language provides a clue. In the bill, sponsored by state Sen. Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino) who brags about the support her measure has from Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the abortion industry et al, we find that the abortion industry can infiltrate the program … for a fee.
The bill would empower the Treasurer of a Medication Abortion Implementation Fund to “hire appropriate individuals or contract with an external organization or organizations to provide consultation to each public university student health center to establish plans and budgets for implementation of abortion by medication techniques. (And) Hire appropriate individuals or contract with external organizations to create and provide appropriate trainings for staff of each public university student health center.”
The billion-dollar abortion industry could get a cut as they counsel college and university health centers on how to become abortion vendors.
And we have not even begun to consider other risks. As I’ve written before, such life-ending drugs have been used by abusers and estranged partners to end the lives of wanted children, when drugs were slipped to women without their consent.
No language in the bill restricts the use of taxpayer dollars or student fees to fund campus abortions, and no need for such a dangerous precedent is apparent. In fact, a recent study showed that all University of California or California State University campuses are within an average of 5.97 miles of a medical abortion provider.
However, if abortion advocates consider abortion providers inaccessible at 6 miles, what kind of attention is being given to emergency care should a woman experience a dangerous complication?
CSU officials have talked with the media, expressing concerns that such a mandate “would impose severe costs for liability insurance, safety improvements, medical training and round-the-clock phone support for medical emergencies.”
“Currently our CSU health centers offer basic health services, however, the administration of medications still requires a level of expertise that our health center staff may not have,” said Toni Molle a spokeswoman for the CSU chancellor’s office, in an interview with the Associated Press.
Given that the stakes are life and death, health center staff should not be tasked with such deadly drugs.
Across California, more than 90 Students for Life groups are now mobilizing on their campuses hosting displays, demonstrating, petitioning, and speaking at community and church events in opposition of SB320. They will continue to demand elected officials protect women’s lives and health by keeping abortion drugs off their campuses.
